Oly: I would like to see the netroots take up the anti-Summers cause as we took up the anti-Bayh cause.

When I made a similar suggestion later on Thursday in another thread, Matt responded by banning me. So I went into a little more detail Friday morning in a comment in Melissa McEwan’s Action Item: No Larry Summers thread on Shakesville, talking about why social network sites are a good complement to petitions for stuff like this:

On sites like myBO, Facebook, and MySpace, it’s single-click for the people who are already members; you get additional viral effects; plus, everybody can see who’s signed on (as opposed to a petition where knowledge and the oh-so-valuable email lists are reserved for the people who set up the list).

Not only that, the media looooves stories related to social networks and new technology, so you’re more likely to get publicity — as Twitter Vote Report just showed so dramatically. When was the last time a petition got that kind of coverage?*

Imagine my delight when I searched Facebook and discovered I wasn’t the only one thinking that way.

The group’s very well laid out, with a summary and links to some excellent critiques of Summers by Naomi Klein, Kim Gandy, and Dean Baker, as well as a pointer to the petition, so it reinforces the other effort. Gotta like that. If you’re on Facebook, please join the group by clicking on Join this group on the top right hand side of the page — and invite your friends by clicking on Invite other people, right below the group’s logo. Pretty easy, huh?

There are some obvious next steps: highlight the Facebook group as well as the petition on the Media Consortium’s new Cabinet Newsletter,** get some action in the blogospheres, start tweeting about it. More ambitiously, now might be a good time for Republicans against Summers to start up their own group, or for people to start something up on myBO, MySpace, and/or BlackPlanet. All of these are likely to reach complementary audiences to the OpenLeft petition and the Facebook group. Of course, at some point the negative energy needs to be turned in a positive direction (how long until somebody starts up a group for, say, Laura D’Andrea Tyson?) … but it’ll be a lot harder to unify on the criteria for a good choice, let alone the actual people, so it’s one of those occasions where starting with a strong rejection of an unacceptable candidate makes a lot of sense.

A great thing about Summers is that there’s so many reasons to be against him that the activism campaign is likely to spread down many different paths. Most obviously this builds on the multi-partisan anti-bailout activism, which while it didn’t get reported in the press was pretty significant. On top of that, comments about women’s intelligence and Africa as “under-polluted” mean that this is likely to get a lot of attention in the feminist, anti-racist, black, and women of color blogospheres. So, while it’s always hard to predict, the conditions are good for something spectacular. Larry’s presumably a little nervous right now.

And man, what is it about progressives and online petitions? Within a period of four hours Friday, a friend forwarded me Mormons Stole Our Rights‘ No tax credit for hate and then something from Rick Jacobs about Courage Campaign‘s Repeal Prop 8, and guess what? Repeal Prop 8 has a Facebook group too, Mormons Stole our Rights is up on Facebook and MySpace

Courage Campaign has used social networks very effectively in their campaigs this year, so it’s not surprising they’re approaching it this way; I don’t know anything about the people behind Mormons Stole Our Rights, but they appear to get it too. Todd Beeton’s Turning Passion into Action on myDD sets the stage for Repeal Prop 8:

For three straight days, we’ve seen massive marches in the streets of Los Angeles and San Francisco. This just doesn’t happen here. It’s amazing to watch take place but there’s a danger that this anger won’t be harnessed and converted into a longterm marriage equality movement.

There are marches in San Diego and elsewhere, too, on an even larger scale than September’s online anti-bailout actions around the country sparked by Arun Gupta’s call-out for a Wall Street Protest on Naomi Klein’s site. In September, however, the online component focused mostly on, guess what, petitions: petitions from Bernie Sanders, CREDO Action, the Center for American Progress, the SEIU the National Taxpayers’ Union, and many others.*** Sanders’ petition got a lot of attention in the progressive blogosphere, about 50,000 signatures — but not a lot of press.

How much energy was harnessed? Well, the people who ran those petitions can send a blast email to all their members; that’s about it, really. By contrast, social network-based activism creates a lot of assets: connections between members, one-to-one communication channels, and discussion threads that can help organize and shape the future.

Let’s face it: in a time when there are 200,000-person viral email campaigns, multi-million person protest groups on Facebook, and viral videos reaching 20-million-plus people, petitions have to rack up mighty big numbers to even have a chance of mattering. By contrast, Ari Melber described Get FISA Right‘s strategy back on July 7: “fan the flames of coverage by making the novel outreach approach a story in its own right”. Sure enough, it worked: with 23,000 people we were all over the mainstream media. Ditto this week for Twitter Vote Report, with 10,000. And let’s not forget #dontgo and 100,000 Strong against Evan Bayh, which got into mainstream media blogs with only a few thousand members by emphasizing the Twitter and Facebook angles.****

Social network sites are hot. Many journalists and MSM sites are looking for stories to show that they get it. The overall narrative of social network activism, including disaster relief and Voces Contra Las FARC, is a powerful one.

Petitions are boring.

And just in case anybody’s forgotten, we just came out of an election where youth activism was hugely important. Guess where kids today hang out? Facebook. Twitter. MySpace. Not blogs. Not email.

A couple of other important sites for the Repeal Prop 8 and Mormons Stole our Rights folks to focus on are myBO, BlackPlanet, and Eons. Reaching out to Obama supporters looking to build on their success is a no-brainer; starting to engage now on BlackPlanet and Eons is critical for making progress reaching out to demographics which supported Prop 8 in 2008. Also important: linking up more effectively with other new efforts like the Repeal Prop 8 TV campaign (started by Brendan of SaysMe.tv) as well as existing “No on 8″ groups on Facebook, MySpace, and all these other sites … and of course continuing to coordinate with on-the-ground activism and new efforts. A lot to do … but you can see the possibilities.

I certainly don’t mean to imply that social network activism is a panacea: the technology bases are all problematic, and as danah boyd points out, it’s challenging to convert the identity group to an action nexus if one doesn’t already exist. On top of that, many people aren’t members of social network sites — and for reasons I’m very sympathetic with, such as Facebook’s creepy and Orwellian vibe and horribleprivacypractices. For that matter, a lot of people just plain prefer email. So petitions are a valuable complement to these other mechanisms.

But they’re not the only game in town. Instead of a petition, what about a blog post with a signature thread, so everybody can see who’s signed on and what they’re saying? It’s just as easy to sign on as a petition; there’s much more value.

Of course, the best way to learn about activism is to engage in it. So, if you’re on Facebook, please join the Repeal Prop 8 and Obama supporters AGAINST Larry Summers groups — and invite your friends. And you hang out elsewhere (or you’re not an Obama supporter but similarly oppose Larry), start up your own group and learn by doing.

* probably Avaaz.org, with there 250,000+-signature petitions, although these days it seems like their ads and events like the “Fossil of the Day Awards” at Bali are what’s really driving the media attention. Update, 10/11: oops. Courage Campaign got coverage in late October for launching their petition to the Mormon Church to stop funding Yes on 8 — here’s the AP story.

** as I wrote the first draft of this, the #2 story on Cabinet Newsladder is Beth Dozoretz’ Larry Summers: The country needs him, a reaction to NOW’s opposition to Summers added to the Newsladder by none other than Max Bernstein, of Max and the Marginalized and 100,000 Strong Against Evan Bayh fame. I still haven’t seen the petition anywhere on the front page — surprising, in light of James Boyce’s front-page OpenLeft post from Thursday inviting people to try Cabinet Newsladder out.

**** It doesn’t always work of course. The largest anti-bailout Facebook group has a little less than 4,000 people, and No Blank Check for Wall Street clocks in at about 900, but with so little discussion of these anywhere in the blogosphere there wasn’t any way to generate media interest. On the other hand, if half of those 50,000 people from the Sanders petition had joined on Facebook as well, we quite possibly could have played the “bigger than Get FISA Right” card and been off to the races. Oh well, maybe next time. For more on the successful pro-drilling activism campaign #dontgo, please see the links in the footnote of Reflections.

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Comments

Ok, so the most important part about petitions or these social networking activities is the disproportional buzz they create related to their actual numbers. When all a group has is signatures on a piece of paper (or emails on a server) its hard to amplify your voice into that, “shot heard ’round the world.” However, if you can get your supporters to do the organizing themselves – recruiting new members, writing op-eds and blogs, and contacting electing officials – the buzz suddenly multiplies exponentially.

Very sorry about the business at openleft.com. I don’t understand the banning or the decision to denigrate the getfisaright movement (or the group’s role in the wider movement; I don’t think anyone claimed it was just GFR, but the myBO aspect of it is what actually compelled Obama’s attention).

I guess I don’t ascribe quite the level of difference to petitions and facebook groups that you do; for example, the ability to re-communicate with members is as limited one way as the other, and many petitions display co-signers though this particular one doesn’t. I’m also a little leery of selling the sizzle of the social networking aspect rather than the steak of what we’re saying, but that’s difference of opinion that predates facebook vs. petition/etc. I guess I don’t want to figure out one next big thing after the other — tweet, twitter, whatnot. We’re not all built that way.

I think there’s a place for blogs, etc — and you do too, obviously, or you wouldn’t have this one, or frequent others as a valued commenter. Facebook-joining is impulsive and exhibitionist (meant in a good way): “yes that’s how I feel,” “I’ll say it loud, I’m (X) and I’m proud.” Blogging can be more reflective and resource-building: “here’s the product of my thinking and research on issue X, here is what many people say about that in comments.”

Anyhow, keep up the great work; I’ll join in, though I’m still bone tired from election work — and now catchup work around the yard and house.

I don’t understand the banning or the decision to denigrate the getfisaright movement I don’t understand the banning or the decision to denigrate the getfisaright movement

Matt’s been undercutting Get FISA Right since as early as mid-July, when he un-promoted a post of mine from the OpenLeft front page. This is also right about when he Chris Bowers, and I had a fairly nasty fight over their lack of attention to diversity. I’ve tried to discuss the situation with them several times but they don’t respond to my email. It’s been a real handicap to GFR — we’ve gotten virtually no progressive blogosphere support since that went down — but I’m not sure what to do about it.

Oh well. More about this elsewhere … meanwhile, back to petitions, social network sites, and blogs.

Stephanie Geffeller’s Re-open Prop 8 petition is an example of one that lets you see who else has signed (it’s up to 260,000 signatures; Courage Campaign’s petition was at 70,000 last night). Still the possibilities are a pale echo of what’s possible on social networks, with nothing at all about the person besides their name, and no way to contact them. By contrast, you or I or anybody else can go to the 200,000-person Repeal the CA Ban on Marriage Equality group, post on the wall there, maybe start up a discussion thread, see whether we’ve got friends in the group and if so message them.

In terms of steak or sizzle, it’s not an either-or. The sizzle gives a reason for people to cover the story; it’s up to us to influence them to include steak as well. If you look at the articles from GFR, TVR, and the VSWiki, we were very successful at putting the real issues on the table, and setting the technology in context. TVR, for example, highlighted the challenges of reaching the communities at risk for voter suppression; VSWiki used the wiki focus to discuss specific voter suppression threats. (The lack of coverage so far of Stephanie’s 260,000-signature-and-counting petition is a good example of this.)

And I completely agree that there’s a place for blogs. As well as offering much richer discussion functionality than most social network sites. blogs are great for narrative, and for working out longer-form ideas. They’re an important path to broad media coverage; and because of RSS feeds, blogs can get things to go viral in very complementary ways.

One thing to highlight is that blogs, like petitions, do tend to concentrate power and reinforce existing power imbalances (e.g. 30-60-year-old dominance and male privilege) so unless you take that into account and consciously respond to it it’s very hard to do get diversity in a blog-oriented campaign. This is another reason why using multiple mechanisms is so effective — a mixed blog/social network/email campaign is ideal.

Obama supporters converted his website into a protest hub against his FISA position last summer, a presidential campaign first that drew coverage from blogs, The Nation, and ultimately traditional media. They can swiftly organize again. I think it will be even easier now, because traditional journalists are ready to jump on these kind of stories, and media coverage is crucial to growing net movements. Activism focused on pushing Obama, however, is not likely to be an immediate priority. After all, supporters are energized by this victory, and there is a broad consensus on the short-term priorities of the economy and Iraq. (One current effort to rally online opposition to one of the more controversial names floated for Obama’s cabinet, Larry Summers, has hardly gained any traction.) Far beyond base activists, the new administration also has an opportunity to tap technology for a more open, transparent and interactive government.(I plan to explore that potential in an upcoming magazine article).

As a 22 year old activist I can say that if you don’t use facebook you’re going to lose a significant portion of the population. Possibly (though not certainly) the ripest, lowest hanging fruit as it were. This isn’t to say that it should be the only tool. That would just be dumb. Try eating dinner sometime without a full set of silverware. Its definitely possible… but why would you do that if you have a freaking spoon in the sink?

Matt Stoller posted yesterday in “Larry Summers Seeks Support from the Fake Left” that the OpenLeft petition is up over 5000 people. His post isn’t available any longer (he ended it with “I deleted a bunch of concern troll comments and will begin banning shortly” … see my point above about blogs centralizing power).

Somebody pointed out to me in email that people care a lot more strongly about Prop 8 than about Larry Summers. A different way of looking at it, though, is that the bailout is also something people feel extremely strongly about — it was less than two months ago that there were a couple of hundred self-organized anti-bailout protests and Congress’ phones and email were jammed. Because the online activism was focused on petitions, now there’s no effective way to mobilize even a small fraction of these people for the much simpler task of showing opposition to Summers. It’s essentially a restart from scratch.

The big blogs aren’t completely ignoring LGBTQ activism; OpenLeft founders couldn’t be bothered to mention it themselves but did front-page Paul Hogarth’s reposting of his BeyondChron article Why Prop 8 Can – and Must – Be Overruled, and Kos covered it too (1, 2). Americablog has had quite a few posts about the boycott and anti-LDS activities, and even reprinted Californians Against Hate’s lengthy formal complaint against the LDS. And so on … all good articles … but …

You’d think that several hundred simultaneous actions in favor of civil liberties organized in about a week by the grassroots using the Internet would be something that would interest progressives.

Why are social networks so threatening?

Or is it the positive and inclusive nature of Join the Impact?

Or that women are leading it?

All of the above?

Very peculiar.

* to be fair, this is getting a little coverage in diaries — Gangster Octopus’ on dKos, for example. Still, there are only a dozen or so recommendations and tips, so basically the only way to find it is if you find the link on Stop the Impact’s media coverage page.

Update, November 18: Paul’s new BeyondChron article on the protests was front-paged on myDD, and once again picked up by Kos, although neither Paul nor Kos actually mentions Join the Impact by name or links to them. More here. However they do mention the Californians Ready to Repeal Prop 8 Facebook group, started by Paul’s friend Trent and now over 200,000 people. This group by the way is currently running a video contest in conjunction with Get FISA Right’s favorite cable TV advertising innovators SaysMe.tv (if you’re on Facebook, check out the sample entry here). Cool!

Lind is a so-called ‘radical centrist’ at the New America Foundation, so I suppose it’s not a surprise that he’s swinging with the times and stealing the intellectual capital of a progressive. That’s how things work in DC.

In fact there’s almost no criticism of Matt, which in a place as contentious as OpenLeft seems surprising … unless you read ObscureName’s diary Living the Banned Life:

I’m assuming I’m banned because I’ve tried to reach the OpenLeft powers a number of times to ask them about it and thus far no reply. After my first email about it the second account was closed. I would really like to know why I was banned if i have been banned. If i haven’t been banned and this is all just a big technical mistake, then I’m very sorry for making any sort of deal out of this. But I do suspect I have been banned.

I think I’ve been banned because of a comment I left on the plagerism accusation meaculpa by Matt. My comment was thus:

p0wned!
lol

Looks like that’s how things work on “Open”Left.

Hey, looks like I was lucky — when I got banned Matt posted about it! I wonder what will happen when I try to claim “Right of Response”?

Update, November 24: On Friday I asked Chris Bowers for the opportunity to respond to Matt’s attack. Chris said no. To be continued …

Intense backlash from women’s groups may have pushed former Clinton Treasury Secretary Larry Summers off the short-list to lead Treasury for President-elect Barack Obama, according to widespread reports circulating in Democratic circles.

The women’s opposition to a possible Summers’ appointment was the explanation some Democratic sources are hearing for why the Obama transition team has crossed Summers off their list. The Obama team doesn’t want to kick off its administration with a controversy nor go head-to-head with an important constituency when there are other qualified candidates, political operatives speculate.

The incident would likely make Summers’ Senate confirmation a rocky proposition, especially since women’s groups and liberal bloggers have already unleashed fierce opposition to him.

The OpenLeft petition is up over 6000, so maybe they did have something to do with it. Then again those “liberal bloggers” are also in the middle of a very loud petition/phone campaign against Joe Lieberman and that doesn’t seem to have any impact at all on Obama’s position … and neither does the previous 43,000-signature petition against Lieberman. So you’ll excuse my skepticism.

Matt does link out to two Facebook groups, each with about 30 people in them, but rather bizarrely doesn’t linking to the much-larger group Ivan Boothe posted about on one of Matt’s threads last week. Hmm.

It’s easy to beat up on Matt — Colin Delany just nominated him for Ambassador to Mars — and since his dickish behavior seriously impacted Get FISA Right and other activism campaigns I’ve worked on, I don’t even feel guilty about enjoying it. Still, while he’s an extreme example, this pattern of relying on old-fashioned techniques that reinforce power imbalances and ignore network effects (and then getting defensive when people bring this up) is pervasive in the progressive blogosphere. [The anti-Lieberman campaign, for example, hasn't ever reached out to Get FISA Right.] And so is the tendency to view things through a confrontative and hostile lens.

Compare and contrast with Join the Impact: inclusive, social network-focused, broad-based. Which has more transformational power?

There were anti-bailout protests around the country during the middle of the election campaign … a trillion dollars without oversight later, with new sectors like the automotive industry lining up at the trough, there’s probably even more energy. Who’s going to take the lead in learning from Join the Impact and applying the same techniques to grassroots activism for economic justice?

Don’t get me wrong: I think CREDO Action does great stuff (it was great working with them on Twitter Vote Report), and I hope that Senate Democrats show some spine and strip Lieberman’s Homeland Security Chairmanship. Seeing fellow FISA apologist Evan Bayh supporting him is about as dramatic a reminder as you can get that civil liberties and the rule of law aren’t partisan issues.

In fact, Join The Impact, an online coalition that rose from the ashes of Prop 8 to fight for LGBT rights, is boasting of a coordinated day of protest tomorrow with cities in all 50 states. (It took Living Liberally 5 years to reach every state in the Union – it took Join The Impact two weeks, which strongly speaks both to the energy out there on this issue and their effectiveness as online organizers.)

The netroots have long argued that progressive politics, including its activist component, shouldn’t be reserved for the coasts and DC, but instead recognized for something that happens everywhere, every day, in acts both big and small.

Props to OpenLeft … while I often give them a hard time, they appear to be the first major progressive blogs to discuss the importance of these protests on the front page.

At least my Oxdown Gazette cross-posts did make it to the recommended list, so at least the one-line title showed up on FDL’s front page Friday morning (the other Prop 8 activism post that have been recommended, including mine from Monday, all had more generic titles). Yay me!

* because, y’know, it’s a high priority for progressives is to get Bill O’Reilly more viewers. wtf.

Since David Dayen’s consistently covered social network activism campaigns at d-day and Hullabaloo, I was wondering whether he mentioned Join the Impact at either of those places. If so, I couldn’t find anything — and digby hasn’t discussed it either.* They’re expecting 40,000 people at the LA protest, but maybe word hasn’t gotten to the People’s Republic of Santa Monica yet.

However, David’s Summers’ Balloon Bursting on d-day is pretty darn relevant to this thread. After linking to Matt’s OpenLeft post and quoting the original Politico piece**

I don’t think this is just about those comments about women and math, although it seemed insane for “No Drama Obama” to immediately cause a controversy with his first cabinet selection. The cable nets and talk radio would have had a field day with it.

But I think the intense reaction by liberals against bringing back the guy who ushered in a lot of deregulation in the 1990s had at least something to do with it.

He then quotes Matt’s “So far, our petition has around 6000 names on it, and several Facebook groups have emerged to protest his possible selection” (before segueing into a discussion of some people that women’s groups have put forward as possibilities). Maybe; as I said above, I’m skeptical. Courage Campaign’s Prop 8 petition is up to 220,000 people and there are a couple Facebook groups also over 200,000. If I were Obama’s transition team, measuring by that bar, the conclusion I’d draw is that liberal opposition to Summers (which I’m sure they predicted) doesn’t appear to interest a lot of people.

Asked what it would mean if Lieberman kept his chairmanship, one Senate Democratic aide said bluntly: “The left has been foiled again. They can rant and rage but they still do not put the fear into folks to actually change their votes. Their influence would be in question.”

I don’t think that’s quite right, as a lot of this is simply persuasion and not brute force. Democratic Senators have not been persuaded to change the way they think about politics, even people like Russ Feingold and Barbara Boxer, who constantly act like wankers while voting reasonably well. But yes, there is an element of telling us to fuck off, and you should get the message. And that message is from everyone who made this possible.

There’s that. But there’s also disdain for the American electorate that voted in overwhelming numbers for change from the discredited Bush/McCain/Lieberman policies. But in a city known for tone-deafness, there clearly isn’t a more tone-deaf group than the Senate Dems.

I’m done with Reid as Senate leader.

John Avraosis’ Americablog post piles on, starting with the premise that the problem is that the netroots are too nice, and then attacking the Democratic party and establishment and progressives in the mainstream media:

They rarely show us any support, but they always want our help when things start going sour. You may have noticed, over the past six months, a dearth of election-oriented ads on our site from the party organs and the various campaigns who begged us, and continue to beg, for help….

And for that matter, has anyone ever gotten a single ad from Rachel Maddow’s or Keith Olbermann’s shows? How about Jon Stewart or Steven Colbert? We all think of their shows as “friends,” and we always help them out when we can. But when it comes to helping us out? Nothing.

Is it just me, or is there a certain lack of introspection in these posts?

Kos is certainly right that Americans did vote overwhelmingly for change. Even in that context, the netroots’ petition/phone/name-calling campaign was so unimpressive that 80% of the Democratic caucus (including netroots faves like Ken Salazar) ignored them. As a result, bloggers’ enemies had a great opportunity to slap them down and mock their impotence — and Republicans can throw gasoline on the flames, with posts like Patrick Ruffini’s Infighting we can believe in on The Next Right.

Rather than wallowing in victimization and negativity, and focusing on Senate Democrats’ “hate” and “disdain” for progressives, now might be a good time to try something different. Hey! I’ve got an idea! What about focusing more on social network sites and wikis, with a positive and inclusive approach? It seems to have worked out pretty well for Join the Impact …

To be fair, Chris Bowers’ Curses, Foiled Again? Hardly on OpenLeft pushes back on the narrative that the last few weeks have been a string of defeats for the left. And David Sirota’s Should We Be Surprised?, also on OpenLeft, has some good analysis of how progressives have allowed the Democratic party to take them for granted, and ends with an excellent point:

If we want to avoid this kind of thing in the future, we better understand why this happened. Because if we don’t, and somehow still expect “change we can believe in,” we’re epitomizing Albert Einstein’s “definition of insanity” – we’re “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”

And Howard Dean had this to say (combining quotes from from Nate Silver’s detailed notes on 538 and Nico Pitney and Sam Stein on the Huffington Post):

“You know, the desire of revenge is great, of course. But the truth is public policy doesn’t run on revenge very well. The truth is, Barack Obama got a mandate to bring the country together and to stop the politics of anger. If you get a mandate for reconciliation … is your first act going to be to kick him [Lieberman] to the curb? If you’re in my generation you say, ‘yeah, damn right we should’”. The younger generation’s message is, let’s put aside something that we can’t agree on and do something about the things that we can agree on.

Reacting quickly, Accountability Now already has their Take The Pledge: “I Will Work To Defeat Joe Lieberman in 2012″ site up. Modeled after a similar campaign in 2006 that helped defeat Joe in the primary, before he recovered and won the general election, they’re asking people to type in their email address, zip code, and optionally phone number to a site without a posted privacy policy.

Chuck Todd makes some excellent points here about the Lieberman vote, including highlights that effective opposition much more likely to come on issues such as wiretapping.

Baratunde Thurston’s What Lieberman Owes Obama on Jack and Jill Politics links off to Jay Newton-Small’s Time article and comments “These perspectives have certainly caused me to think more carefully about my kneejerk emotional responses and try to see things from a wider perspective.” In a comment, I added

On civil liberties, the way I see it, if Obama takes an active pro-civil-libierties stance he has a chance to wrestle a majority in the Senate no matter what role Joe’s in., If Obama doesn’t then these issues will get back-burnered unless there’s massive public outcry — so once again, Joe’s role isn’t that big a factor.

Jed L points out that Kos’s “good-natured and eminently reasonable tone” comes across very well in Norah O’Donnell’s interview, and I agree: he effectively highlights how the issue should have been about how Joe hasn’t been a very good committee chair. Look back at the progressive bloggers’ rhetoric, though: how much did they emphasize the competence-based critique, and how much was about “Lie-berman”‘s “treachery,” “lack of principles,” and past and future “betrayals”? Howard Dean wasn’t aware of any of the competence concerns … progressive bloggers should think about why their message isn’t coming across.

Well, number one you have to look at the source. There you have someone who isn’t even going to speak on the record, under their own name. That would suggest some fear right there, hiding behind anonymity for a very basic claim to the Washington Post.

Well said.

I also liked Ari’s final point:

Obviously, the netroots and the larger social networking support, particularly among people under 30, who care about the Iraq war, who care about dismantling the surveillance architecture of the Bush years, obviously they have a huge impact, obviously they’re going to continue to make their voice heard.

President-elect Barack Obama will introduce Monday his National Economic Council director, Lawrence Summers, and his Treasury secretary nominee, Timothy Geithner, two men from the same ideological wing of the Democratic Party but with different roles in the new administration….

As a White House appointee, Mr. Summers, a former president of Harvard University, won’t have to put his famously prickly — some say imperious — personality on display in Senate confirmation hearings. But he will get to flex his elbows behind closed doors to ensure the NEC is returned to its place as the clearing house for policy ideas and initiatives….

“Summers is the thinker, the ideas guy,” said one Obama economic adviser. “Geithner is the implementer.”

Though unassuming, Geithner is sufficiently forceful to stand up to Summers, a brilliant economist whose people skills are sometimes found wanting.

“It’s hard to push back on Larry. It can be a little intimidating,” says Steven Radelet of the Center for Global Development, who worked with both men at Treasury. “Tim can push back on Larry. Larry respects him a lot.”

Once at Microsoft, I was on an interview loop for a senior position where part of the informal job description was “has to be strong enough to stand up to X” (X being a well-known power-mongering guy). Noting that none the candidates we were talking to were women, I asked if this was code for “has to be a guy”. Have to wonder if the same thing’s going on here.

Ah well. As Ed Kilgore discusses in “Obama the Centrist” in The Democratic Strategist points out, these and other appointments are consistent with Obama’s policy positions; their positions have evolved; and the scope of the economic crisis significantly changes things. (Tom Watson explores similar ground in a broader context in Change we can perceive in on techPresident.) So while it’s very disappointing, it’s not particularly surprising — especially with the tactics Summers’ opponents used.

As Digby points out, trial balloons are a test of strength; on this one, the progressive blogosphere once again showed up as weak — and their petition-based approach failed to build for the future. By contrast, an inclusive social network-based approach could have gotten some coverage outside the “liberal bloggers angry again” frame, put a network in place to get involved in the next iteration of the bailout battle, and sent a signal that progressives are willing to learn from their past successes. When I’m right, I’m right.

There was an interesting dialog between Ben Smith of Politico and Sam Graham-Felsen of the Obama campaign about “the blogosphere’s organizing against Barack’s support for warrantless wiretapping”:

Ben: “Did you listen to them?”

Sam: “We definitely listened…. Barack issued a serious statement and took them very seriously…. I think they appreciated how seriously he took them.

Ben: “Do you think it was wise of them to organize on your site?”

Sam: “Yes.”

In the four months since then, nobody in the progressive blogosphere has followed Get FISA Right‘s lead and organized on myBO. And similarly, nobody the progressive blogosphere has followed 100,000 Strong against Evan Bayh‘s lead and made a Facebook splash. or #dontgo and used Twitter.

Meanwhile the “Stonewall 2.0″ LGBTQ rights net movement is an example of what’s possible today with an approach based on social networks. Join the Impact went from an idea to a couple of hundred thousand people in the streets in just ten days with a wiki/social network-based campaign and is continuing forward with campaigns like Project Postcard. Californians ready to repeal prop 8 has 230,000 people and is working with SaysMe.tv on cable TV ads. Coming soon: December 10′s Day Without a Gay, gearing up for a nationwide DOMA Protest on January 10. etc. etc.

The social-action hub has just announced that the project now has the backing of MySpace and a broad coalition of supporting partners, including techPresident, the Sunlight Foundation, Netroots Nation, VotoLatino, GOOD Magazine, Change Congress, Campus Progress, and People for the America Way…. Instead, once the top ten ideas are identified, “we will then build a national campaign to advance each idea in Congress, marshaling the resources of Change.org, MySpace, and our dozens of partner organizations and millions of combined members.”

Tony Jones’ The Newsweek Same Sex Marriage Kerfuffle on BeliefNet’s The New Christians makes an interesting point in his analysis of reactions to Newsweek’s cover story on the religious case for marriage equality. After linking to blogs on BeliefNet, gay.com, and Washington Post/Newsweek, he adds:

The rest of the left, as far as I can tell, is thus far silent. Nothing at Huffington, the DailyKos, [UPDATE: DailyKos take here] The New Republic, Mother Jones, or the Utne Reader. The right may be right that the media tilts left, but as one who is progressive and religious, I’m particularly pissed at how little play religion gets in the progressive press. This dust-up is a case-in-point

Agreed. And as well as ignoring religion, by not discussing this article they’re underplaying LGBTQ issues — just as they have with Join the Impact and the whole Stonewall 2.0 movement (which by the way was in the NY Times again). Hmm. One pattern here: progressive bloggers’ lack of awareness on important issues — so blinding, it gives the appearance of lack of respect to the stakeholders (persons of faith, LGBTQs). Ah well. Other patterns are more positive, for example the MSM now taking the lead on some of these issues (go MSM!), and as-yet-untapped opportunities for alliances.

Ed Kilgore’s Bypassing bloggers on The Democratic Strategist did a great job of summing up an insightful point by Patrick Ruffini*:

To put it another way, the Obama campaign typically treated bloggers as unnecessary “gatekeepers” that could be bypassed, much as bloggers have treated the would-be opinion-leaders of the MSM.

Indeed. In a comment, I suggested that one of the reasons many bloggers are so dismissive of social networks is because this loss of power is so threatening to them (just as the MSM dismissed bloggers). Whether or not the dudez of the progressive blogosphere want to talk about homosexuality, it’s on the agenda. Ditto for religion.

jon

* Patrick’s original post The Case Against Blogs and Twitter on the The Next Right is well worth reading too — it’s probably the most nuanced discussion I’ve seen yet of the implications of Obama’s online strategy.

[...] catalyzed by groups like Join the Impact and Courage Campaign that I’ve blogged about in Petitions are soooooo 20th century and Taking social network activism (and LGBTQ rights) to the next [...]

Progressive bloggers are once again bugging me in the change.org Ideas for Change competition. Here’s a rant I cut out of a longer post:

I’d like to shine a particularly critical spotlight on the “progressive” blogosphere which is asleep at the wheel here (as always with a few notable exceptions). C’mon. From a civil liberties perspective, the idea aligns squarely with your stated values, and as Open for Questions demonstrated you can have a significant influence. wtf. change.org has gotten coverage in the technology-in-politics realm, most recently David Herbert’s Progressives: Move Over, Change.gov in the National Journal and Nancy Scola’s Vote for Change (Again) on techPresident so there’s really no excuse. Yeah, I know: progressive blogosphere marginalizes social networks, immigrants, and youth, nothing to see here, move along, move along. And of course the underlying point is that events like the Ideas for Change competition simultaneously highlight the role of the gatekeepers and enable mechanisms for routing arond them it is still really irritating to see progressive bloggers fecklessness here. Grr.

[...] catalyzed by groups like Join the Impact and Courage Campaign that I’ve blogged about in Petitions are soooooo 20th century and Taking social network activism (and LGBTQ rights) to the next [...]

[...] people in the streets in ten days for marriage equality (another cause progressives support), there was virtually no coverage in the “progressive blogosphere”. Since then, I’ve seen very little discussion — at the Politics Online conference, for [...]